Friday, August 15, 2014

HART ridership continues to gain steam with a 4.6 percent increase, compared to the same month last year.

A total of 1,235,600 trips were taken last month, which marks the tenth consecutive month of serving more than 1 million bus riders in FY2014. This continues a strong upward ridership trend for HART, coming after a record year in 2013 with 14.6 million riders.

"With the initiatives and improvements, we are seeing progressive growth," said HART Interim Chief Executive Officer Katharine Eagan. "We will continue to implement other changes to benefit and attract more riders."

Fast facts:

July 28 saw the highest daily ridership throughout the month with 55,179 riders

Year-to-date (October 2013 - July 2014), bus ridership is up 1.9 percent; an increase of 234,099 trips, compared to the same period last year

For the month of July, bicycle boardings in Hillsborough County saw a 7.9 percent increase over June's numbers. HART logged 20,120 boardings compared to 18,649 last month.

If you haven't ridden a HART bus recently, you may be surprised at how much more "user friendly" the system has become thanks to the HART OneBusAway Tampa app, which empowers riders with Real-Time Bus Location Information. The OneBusAway Tampa app provides a suite of tools to deliver real-time bus tracking information to HART riders on the go.

With the HART OneBusAway Tampa app, riders can easily find out when the next bus will arrive at their stop. The FREE application is available on a number of devices and platforms (Desktop computer, tablets, smartphones, Android, iPhone and mobile phones with browsers), which means less waiting at the stop and more time enjoying other things.